Hi!
Bart Meerdink wrote:
>
> Maybe this is flamebait in this newsgroup, but that's not my intention.
>
> People who have tried Opera on Linux migtht ask themselves if Opera
> isn't a lot closer to what Mozilla should be than Mozilla itself (wrt
> functionality, I'm not speaking about the open source/license).
So, who defines what "Mozilla should be"? The Slashdot-crowd? The
End-User? Web-designers? You?
Currently managers (in the broadest sense; this includes mozilla.org,
AOL/TW, Redhat etc...) do. They think they know best what the market
wants.
If you think AOL/TW doesn't want to have a nearly-complete XP,
embeddable, highly-standards-compliant browser together with a
fully-featured mail/news-reader, then why do they still throw developers
at it?
Please don't misunderstand me, I personally think Opera is a very good
browser with a high degree of customizability, but there are IMO some
critical features missing, e.g. full DOM support (add/delete nodes),
incremental reflow, the ability to embed Opera.
I'm not a professional programmer, but I'd bet the current design of
Opera would make implementing these features very difficult, in this
regard they're probably in a similar situation NS was before switching
to Gecko. By implementing this, they'd also make their product much more
complex and'd be subject to many of the problems Mozilla has.
> I really think that Mozilla has passed the point where every bugfix
> sooner or later causes (in average) more than one new bug.
> To quote Bill Lee (20010518 10:44): "I think everyone's bumping into
> each other in a large dark room trying to get all the bugs fixed post
> haste."
You're right that there are far too many regressions, and many
developers are complaining about it (just read the weekly status
report). Nevertheless, I think this is partly also a matter of
perception. Nowadays, there are much more people using Mozilla than,
say, a year ago. This translates to more QA -> more bugs being reported,
more regressions being noticed.
OTOH, I'd bet about one half of the current open bugs are Metabugs, Dups
of other bugs, or fixed without anyone noticing.
Christian
